required reading: Raise the Crime Rate by Christopher Glazek

The problems of criminal imprisonment and prison rape are not on our radar at TRC. As such, I don’t have anything to add to this story on the injustice of our prison system other than to say, Oh My God.

TRC recommends Raise the Crime Rate, by Christopher Glazek at N+1 Magazine, if for no other reason than I think we should be aware of what happens behind those walls that are meant to keep the criminals away.

The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.
…In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.